In September of last year, Canlis executive chef Aisha Ibrahim came to owners Mark and Brian Canlis to give them the official word: She and her wife, Samantha Beaird, wanted to get serious about opening their own restaurant. Ultimately the couple would need to leave Canlis, their professional home for nearly four years, to devote the time necessary to make that happen. She did not expect the Brothers Canlis, in turn, to share a surprise update of their own.

The nebulous plans exchanged that day have coalesced into foundation-altering changes at Seattle’s most storied restaurant. First, Ibrahim and Beaird will leave their roles (executive chef and executive sous chef, respectively) April 8. The search for a new executive chef has begun, but there’s more transition to come. In early June, Brian Canlis will step away from his family’s third-generation restaurant and relocate to Nashville. He just accepted a job working with restaurateur Will Guidara, probably the industry’s premier thinker on matters of hospitality. (And, yes, a key inspiration in The Bear.)

“It feels like a piece of your heart has been ripped out,” says Mark. “It’s sad. The other side of that is I am so proud of him for making this call.” 

What sounds like a long journey toward self-actualization for Brian also changes the narrative of a restaurant that turns 75 this December and has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance since Mark and Brian took over from their parents in 2007. Their decisions, and Ibrahim’s food, keep the restaurant soundly on the national radar. It’s way too soon to know who will run that kitchen (historically they’ve hired outside Seattle), or what the restaurant will look like without the alchemy of two siblings balancing audacious ideas with canny stewardship. But for a restaurant with more than its fair share of chapters, this much change (not to mention a family member handing over his keys) happening all at once is unprecedented.

Chef’s Choice

Ibrahim is just the seventh executive chef in the restaurant’s history, and her tenure has been impressive; she’s currently a semifinalist for a James Beard Award, was a 2023 Food and Wine Best New Chef, and has racked up a host of other accolades including this Time100 list. She and Beaird arrived from Bangkok in 2021 for this job and had previously lived and worked across Asia. 

No surprise, opening their own place has always been the dream. Alas, Ibrahim’s Seattle fans will need to travel to visit her next spot; the couple has narrowed their location down to either New York or Los Angeles.

The food, though, Ibrahim knows already. She envisions a restaurant that reflects her roots in the southern Philippines; most modern Filipino restaurants in the US, she notes, draw on dishes from the country’s northern and central regions. Ibrahim lived in the southern Philippines until age 6, when her family moved to West Virginia. In a country that’s nearly 80 percent Roman Catholic, “I’m Indigenous Muslim on my dad’s side,” she says. “I am a child of Mindanao and forever connect to that place.” 

She doesn’t see any Michelin-level fine-dining restaurants out there that reflect this experience. (Now is a good time to note that the influential Michelin guide does not publish a Seattle edition, which means restaurants in our region are not eligible for Michelin stars.)

At Canlis, Ibrahim did a savvy job weaving her own food and heritage into a menu that will always hold a place for the Canlis salad. A recent “very fine dining” take on escabeche, for example, was a tribute to her late grandmother. She considers it an honor to walk the dining room and meet first-time visitors eating flavors their grandparents cooked at home. But despite her emotions about leaving, “there was always going to be a cap at Canlis.” Ultimately chefs with the necessary level of ambition and skill want to see their own name on the door. 

Brian’s Big Move

As for the guy whose name is on the door, Brian Canlis first expressed his concerns to his brother on a slower night in fall 2023 over a few cocktails in the restaurant’s penthouse. Setting himself and his family up for success for the next few decades, he admitted, might not look like running a restaurant night after night.

He started this career as a single guy in his 20s.  “Now, I’m in my late 40s, I have four small children. I’m just a different person.” He likens this evolution to putting on a shirt you picked out decades earlier. “In the last few years I’ve been avoiding looking in the mirror—it doesn’t look so good anymore.” 

Enter some self-examination, some therapy, and some watering of that “tiny little sprout” of a feeling (Canlises are fond of metaphors and similes), and he finally reached a decision. But it was not easy. Between the weight of legacy and his love of working with Mark, “it makes it hard to shine a light on an idea as crazy and dangerous as uprooting my entire life.” 

Brian and his wife, Mackenzie, were already set on Nashville when the job with Guidara coalesced. It’s near her family in Texas. Sunnier. Some close members of their circle had already transplanted there, including Guidara and his wife, uber baker Christina Tosi. 

Brian and Guidara were college roommates at Cornell. (Guidara’s 2022 book, Unreasonable Hospitality describes Brian Canlis like so: “He had a gecko. He loved playing chess. He wore purple Converse, and he always had a yo-yo on him”.) 

After weighing the risks inherent when two friends become business partners, says Brian, they decided on a one-year trial. While he doesn’t have a formal title, he’ll continue to work with Guidara on The Welcome Conference, an annual hospitality summit, plus a new gathering in the works. “He needs bandwidth, and I am bandwidth,” says Brian. “We have no end to the amount of fun ideas we have. But none of them are opening a restaurant.”

Brian will sell his share of Canlis to Mark and his wife, Anne Marie, but remain on the restaurant’s board. Anne Marie Canlis has now joined both the restaurant and its executive team. “One of the most important roles I played at the restaurant is Mark’s collaborator,” says Brian. “He’s like this bouncy ball, and he needs walls to bounce off.” Family is helpful for this. “If you’re an employee, it’s hard to be that hard surface.” 

Such enormous changes in close proximity will stress test Canlis’s operational philosophy. “The flourishing of your people is the number one thing,” is how Mark Canlis puts it. He credits this approach for the restaurant’s ongoing success. Last year Canlis saw record revenue (though not record profits for a variety of reasons, including the settlement of a wage-theft lawsuit).

This company philosophy of “turning toward” one another is now literally a case study at Harvard Business School; Mark currently teaches a class on it at Cornell. And when some of your most central people decide flourishing means moving on, he says, all you can do is “hold hope and sadness at the same time.” And make sure each of them gets a proper send-off.

New Chapter, Same Book

It's a lot of change. The restaurant has transitioned chefs only a half-dozen times in seven-plus decades. “Everything is hard, every time,” says Mark. But also: “Every time breathes life into the place. I think that’s part of why it works, or how it stays young.”

Does subtracting a brother mean Canlis won’t have the bandwidth to plan roller skating parties and scavenger hunts and the other spectacles that shape the restaurant’s brand—and keep it young? Mark is the wildly creative one, says Brian. “He’s the one who puts in ball pits and hot tubs. I’m the guy who helps execute.” 

The Brothers Canlis, and Ibrahim, already have plans in the works for menu changes and some events later this year. 

Of course, there is one other Canlis brother. Matt, a pastor in Wenatchee, was never attracted to restaurants as a profession. “He still isn’t,” says Mark. “I just double-checked.”